Abstract
Dear Colleagues,
The resurging economy is good news for the IB community and bodes well for future investment in industrial biotechnology. This resurgence coupled with growing interest in the development and commercialization of sustainable biobased products will allow us to continue with the mission of developing biobased products from renewable feedstocks. This mission has a long history and goes back many decades to include visionaries like Dr. George Washington Carver, Mr. Henry Ford and Mr. Wheeler McMillen. Ford and McMillen were leaders of the Chemurgic Movement that envisioned a future in which agriculture would provide the feedstock for many industrial applications. We have also seen this vision expressed in popular culture through the character George Bailey of It's a Wonderful Life who's friend Sam introduces him to the possibility of producing plastics from soybeans in Rochester, NY. Finally, many of us will recall the excitement surrounding Chad Holliday's, former CEO of DuPont, book Walking the Talk: The Business Case for Sustainable Development. This book, along with those of other corporate leaders, made the business case for sustainable production of consumer goods.
In this issue of IB we continue this story by engaging a group of business and academic leaders in a Roundtable Discussion, led by our own Brent Erickson, Consulting Editor and Executive Vice President, Industrial & Environmental Section, Biotechnology Industry Organization (BIO). The focus of this roundtable is on “Consumer Attitudes on Renewable and Sustainable Chemicals.” Our goal in sponsoring this roundtable is to help our readers understand how consumer attitudes are influencing market pull for sustainable bioproducts and to identify some of the challenges in “walking the talk.” Jeremy Xu, Vice President, Global Sales and Applications, DuPont Industrial Biosciences, introduces us to two surveys conducted by DuPont that sought to gain insight into consumers' attitudes toward green products. These surveys served as a jumping off point for an engaging dialogue with our roundtable panelists. Jack Huttner, President & CEO, Huttner Strategies, LLC, underscores the progress that has been made over the last 13 years, during which a small set of companies served as the pioneers for the domestic bioproducts sector, and how the vision of a sustainable biobased industry has evolved. In addition, he emphasizes that in marketing sustainable biobased products to consumers we also need to meet the expectations of environmental groups and of the retailers that influence consumers' attitudes.
We continue our assessment of the biobased economy with two Industry Reports that provide additional insights into the challenges and opportunities for developing sustainable biobased industries. The nova-Institute report entitled “Bio-based Polymers–Production Capacity Will Triple from 3.5 Million Tonnes in 2011 to Nearly 12 Million Tonnes in 2020” provides us with an assessment of the current market for biobased polymers and provides estimates of future growth. This report also emphasizes the global competition for biobased polymers market share, with Asia and South America aggressively pursuing market share. The Milken Institute report entitled “Unleashing the Power of the Bio-Economy” illustrates how strong consumer preferences and growing corporate interest in fulfilling these preferences are shaping market opportunities for sustainable biobased products. However, shifting markets, challenging capital requirements, and strong competition from the oil and gas industry are major barriers to biobased products deployment. All-and-all these are exciting, yet challenging times for the global biobased economy.
Agricultural feedstocks will continue to play an important role in the development of the biobased economy. In this IB issue our Catalyzing Innovation feature focuses on the need to integrate genomics datasets into process integration strategies for driving agricultural feedstocks to bioproducts. Systems biology and the omics offer unprecedented opportunities for biotechnology innovations; however, the success in realizing these opportunities will hinge on our ability to manage and process increasingly large plant and microbial genome datasets. Our colleagues at Genedata AG (Basel, Switzerland) and Genedata Inc. (San Francisco, CA) have identified some of the challenges and opportunities in managing and processing these datasets, and they provide a compelling story about the need to develop scalable and data-flexible software platforms for faster identification of genetic modification opportunities in plants and microorganisms. This story is a logical extension of our discussion on the status on genomic sequencing and DNA synthesis, and it lays the foundation for our upcoming IB IN DEPTH special research section on systems biology to be published later this year.
Over the years, the content of Industrial Biotechnology has been shaped by a number of academic, government, and corporate stakeholders that have provided original and insightful contributions to the journal. Glenn Nedwin, Vicki Glaser, and I have been supported in this endeavor by a talented and engaging Editorial Board. Given the important role that the Editorial Board plays in developing content for the journal we thought that it was time for our IB community to get to know a little better the research and development leaders behind the journal. Three of our Editorial Board members are featured in this issue: Drs. Katrina Cornish, Brian Davison, and Christina Drake. Each of these Editorial Board members brings strong scientific and technical expertise and unique perspectives to the journal. Drs. Cornish and Drake are very active in the bioproducts/biomaterial space from different scale and operational perspectives. Dr. Cornish is a professor at the Ohio State University (OSU), Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center, Wooster, OH. Her career has included tenure at the USDA Agricultural Research Service where she was involved in plant-based biopolymer production. She continued this interest with a stint at Yulex Coporation, and this passion lives on at OSU. Thus, she brings experience and insights from the corporate, government, and academic sectors. Dr. Christina Drake is a Senior Research Engineer at Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control. Her research focus is on nanotechnology and metamaterials. She is passionate about her work on chemical sensors with a focus on biofunctionalizing sensors for high analyte specificity. Dr. Brian Davison is Chief Scientist for Systems Biology and Biotechnology at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. Brian was our guest editor for the August 2012 IB special issue on biomass characterization. As a USDOE Chief Scientist, he has been a champion for renewable bioenergy and bioproducts development, and an excellent public spokesman on the topic of biotechnology and sustainable human development. A hardy thank you to these Editorial Board members and the other members of the Board!